Suppes attends Grice's seminar on Freedom

by JLS
for the GC

NOT QUITE. What he says in his online "Free will" paper on Kant may need to be balanced with Kant's careful consideration of 'arbitrium brutum', perhaps?

Patrick Suppes (born 1922) is a philosopher at Stanford. His essay at

http://suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/articles/psych/323.pdf

on freewill:

"Voluntary motion, biological computation, and free will" appeared in "Midwest Studies in Philosophy" (1994)

makes some good Griceian points. Suppes contributed to Grandy/Warner, PGRICE.


"What bearing does the general indistinguishability of determinism and indeterminism, as I argued for in a recent paper (Suppes, 1993), have on the
classical philosophical problem of free will?"

"Free will is a manifestation of the causal efficacy of mental events. Such events are, in turn, manifestations
of physical events, which ... cannot be observed directly."

"This meant-to-be straightforward causal account of free will leaves no place
for indeterminism or instability in the arena of human intention and action,
even though it is entirely compatible with indeterminism in the behavior of
elementary particles or black holes."

"In contrast, the radical response is that the exercise of free will, as seen
in the daily activity of humans and other animals high on the evolutionary
scale, constitutes prima facie evidence of indeterminism in human affairs."

"This
radical view, now not much defended by many philosophers, would obviously
favor indeterminism over instability as the correct philosophical backdrop for
the plain man’s view of the world."

"There are, it seems to me, two central principles that should govern
our account of free will."

"The first is that small causes can produce large
effects."

"The second is that random phenomena are maximally complex, and it
is complexity that is phenomenologically evident in many human actions that
are not constrained but satisfy ordinary ideas of being free actions."

"Human intentions
and actions exhibit in some cases the stability we anticipate of many parts
of the physical world and in other cases the instability that is characteristic
of many other kinds of physical phenomena."


"In the case of movement of a limb, whether an arm or a leg, there are three
kinds of actions or events that we can distinguish."

"One class consists of the
movements themselves. Another consists of the forces exerted by the muscles.
for example, a change in muscle tension to produce a movement, and the third
consists of proprioceptive signals from the nervous system to the muscles to
affect the forces exerted by the muscles."

"The
first-level explanation of the ubiquitous perception-and-movement-correction
data is in terms of goals and intentions."

A: Why is Mary turning the corner?
B: Because she is going to the store.

C: Why is Henry moving backward so fast?
D: He is trying to get to John’s lob in time to hit the ball back across the net.”

"This
intentional feature of commonsense psychology is really denied by no one.
Such ordinary intentional actions bear the strongest possible witness to the
existence of free will in the present framework."

"If my wife or I go to the nearest grocery store to
purchase a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread, I can predict within a few feet
or meters where the motion will stop, and then return to the house, again to
a position known within a few meters or feet."

"When a bird dives from a hundred feet into the
ocean to catch a fish it has seen, its complicated motion is certainly purposeful
in both the weak and strong senses that I would want to use, but it is doubtful
if we want to attribute consciousness to birds, It is not even clear that we
want to attribute consciousness to dogs."

"A dog that is told to fetch the paper,
certainly in the sense used here, engages in purposeful motion, but may not
be conscious of the goal he is achieving because there is not the appropriate
concept of consciousness to apply to the dog’s mental life.
Intentions."

"The analysis of voluntary motion was already a major topic in ancient
philosophy, for it received systematic attention from Aristotle."

"Of course, Aristotle does not discuss predictability of one kind or
another, but rather the different kinds of causes that separate voluntary motion
from involuntary motion."

"An intellectual mismatch may be
seen in Kant’s placing on the side of experience all of physics, but
essentially nothing of traditional philosophical concepts of moral behavior.
Aristotle had a more realistic approach."

"The expression of will -- to use the modern term -- is to be found first of all and most generally in the biological
behavior of animals, not simply in the highly restricted domain of
moral choices."

"Voluntary motion in animals is guided by reason, desire. or
imagination."

"The Kantian thesis has been properly stood on its head. Free will, as
exemplified in voluntary motion, is the hard empirical fact. Determinism (or, if
you prefer, indeterminism) is the transcendental metaphysical assumption out
of reach of detailed confirmation."

"A frog sitting on a rock “watching” for insects to eat is
a good example."

"The frog does not compute a goal, and it does not correct
its current stationary position or the motion of any of its parts. What it does
do is respond more or less automatically to the perception of a small moving
object by flicking out its tongue to catch the object. Perception is essential to
the behavior of the frog."

"My going to
a store to buy something is a paradigm
of voluntary motion. ... The same may be said of the behavior of an animal chasing a prey, or also of
the behavior of an animal trying to escape a predator."

"Biological organisms are necessarily open systems. As open
systems they must make computations about their environments in order to
survive."

"These computations, concerned in the case of voluntary motion with
goal-setting, perception, and course correction, cannot be analyzed away either
in terms of a sequence of deterministic causes or in terms of a sequence of
probabilistic physical causes."

Suppes concludes his essay with a slate:


I. Determinism does not imply predictability.

II. Determinism and randomness are consistent.

III. Universal determinism or universal indeterminism is a transcendental metaphysical assumption.

IV. Voluntary motion has three characteristics:
-- 1. Physically unpredictable;
-- 2. Predictable given knowledge of goal;
-- 3. Perception and path correction required.

V. Voluntary motion is characteristic of many animal species.

VI. Voluntary motion requires several kinds of biological computation.

VII. Biological computation has evolved as part of the struggle to survive and is a natural part of the universe.

VIII. Biological computation exhibits free will.

IX. The puzzle is resolved because there is no scientific theory of

X. There is no transcendental nonbiological origin of moral responsibility.

XI, Moral responsibility is part, but only part, of the natural history of free will.

.